howaįki apai?

Five years ago, I discovered a copy of Carolyn Quintero's Osage grammar and it swept me off my feet. I was impressed with what a well-organised and beautifully-written book it was and entranced with the language it described. I devoured it. I read and re-read the marvelous descriptions of its mind-boggling verbal complexes and struggled to wrap my mind around its syntax. I discovered a Siouan mailing list that Quintero occasionally contributed to and read through a couple years' worth of archived posts.

The only flaw in the grammar was that there was no glossary. Undaunted, I sat down with a legal pad and created my own. The only dictionary I could find of the language was Francis LaFlesche's, but it was hard to use and full of errors. (I don't mean to run down LaFlesche--he did the best he could when even few Osage were interested in preserving the language--but he was a native speaker of Omaha-Ponca, another Siouan language, and that interfered with his attempts to render Osage words correctly.) There were other sources of Osage vocabulary, such as the texts of George Dorsey, but they were even harder to track down or make use of.

But all of this was moot, because in addition to being commissioned to write a grammar, Quintero had also been tasked by the Osage Nation with the compilation of a dictionary. And from reading the Siouan list, I learned it was to be published any day! As I wrote at the time:

It's both a relief and a torture to find out that Quintero sent her dictionary to the publisher last December; a relief because I'm tired of working from the couple-page wordlist I've managed to squeeze out of her book, a torture because of course I want my copy NOW and can't figure out what's taking so goddamn long.

Half-a-year later, its publication was still just around the corner. No sweat, these things happen. But it was the same the year after that. I got frustrated and I lost interest. Irish began to claim my attention, then Hindi, then Polish.

I stopped reading the Siouan list, but occasionally hope would flicker up again and I would check the University of Oklahoma Press website. I wasn't surprised to see a blurb for the Osage Dictionary appear over a year ago announcing its pending publication. And I wasn't surprised to see it hang there, month after month, with no change in status. Part of me longed to pre-order, but part of me was loath to admit that I was getting my hopes up again. Around Christmastime, when monshu went mad and ordered every expensive title on my wish list, he put this on, too. Last month, when Amazon asked yet again if he wanted to renew the order, he finally replied "No".

So it was merely out of some ingrained habit that I checked the page again two days ago. I certainly had no hope of seeing the words "Published: 2009" appear there. Such was my disbelief that I went straight to WorldCat; only after I saw it listed as being held by various libraries around the country (including the mother of them all, Library of Congress) did I dare to hope that I might actually hold a copy within my hands before the end of the week.

And still I dare to hope. Amazon tells me that it was shipped from some wide spot in the road called "Whitestown, Indiana" yesterday morning. It further informs me of an "Arrival Scan" which supposedly took place at 7:17 last night. Arrival where? Not here, my friends! Arrival at the post office? Arrival in Chicago? WHERE IS THIS BOOK? I know, after five years, what's five days? But--well, you know what I'm saying: hkǫbra atxąhe!